They get to the 18th green at Torrey Pines, stick a couple tees in the spot, and try The Putt — the 15-foot downhill, bumpier-than-a-pepperoni-pizza slider that Tiger Woods needed on the 72nd hole Sunday to force an unthinkable playoff at the best U.S. Open ever played.

“You see people try it a lot,” says Allen Merryman, an assistant pro at Torrey. “They all want to be Tiger.”

They never are.

“I know that spot,” Merryman says. “It’s funny, but you watch the replay and it doesn’t seem like that putt should go in from that spot. It shouldn’t do what Tiger’s putt did that day. I don’t know, it’s like it was willed-in somehow.”

This Sunday, the 10-year anniversary of The Putt, they’ll stick the pin in the very spot it was 10 years ago, just to let people tear off a swatch of history, the day Tiger Woods did something so unthinkable it may go down as the...